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How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
by Carol Anderson
From the award-winning, NYT bestselling author of White Rage, the startling--and timely--history of voter suppression in America, with a foreword by Senator Dick Durbin, now with a new afterword by the author.
In her New York Times bestseller White Rage, Carol Anderson laid bare an insidious history of policies that have systematically impeded black progress in America, from 1865 to our combustible present. With One Person, No Vote, she chronicles a related history: the rollbacks to African American participation in the vote since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Known as the Shelby ruling, this decision effectively allowed districts with a demonstrated history of racial discrimination to change voting requirements without approval from the Department of Justice.
Focusing on the aftermath of Shelby, Anderson follows the astonishing story of government-dictated racial discrimination unfolding before our very eyes as more and more states adopt voter suppression laws. In gripping, enlightening detail she explains how voter suppression works, from photo ID requirements to gerrymandering to poll closures. In a powerful new afterword, she examines the repercussions of the 2018 midterm elections. And with vivid characters, she explores the resistance: the organizing, activism, and court battles to restore the basic right to vote to all Americans.
"This whiplash-inducing chronicle of how a nation that just a few short years ago elected its first black president now finds itself in the throes of a deceitful and craven effort to rip this most essential of American rights from millions of its citizens." - Booklist (starred review)
"Anderson is a highly praised academic who has mastered the art of gathering information and writing for a general readership, and her latest book could not be more timely." - Kirkus Reviews
"Anyone interested in American democracy or how equality can be not only legislated but realized will find this account illuminating and clarifying." - Publishers Weekly
"Anderson is a stinging polemicist; her book rolls through a condensed history of voting rights and disenfranchisement, without getting bogged down in legislative minutiae. This is harder than it looks...This trenchant little book will push you to think not just about the vote count but about who counts, too." - Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
"Anderson has a gift for illustrating how specific historical injustices have repercussive, detrimental influence on contemporary American life...Throughout One Person, Anderson's tone, at turns urgent and indignant, seems to arise from the ease with which she can document abundantly--via investigative journalism, popular history and historical scholarship--the GOP's determined efforts to purge American citizens and cull and homogenize the electorate." - Los Angeles Times
"As the last two national elections demonstrated, many Americans feel angry, frustrated, and confused by a voting system that simply doesn't work; Anderson traces the ugly history of disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, and suppression that disable true democracy." - Boston Globe
""Serves as a gimlet-eyed analysis of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Jim Crow laws." - O, the Oprah Magazine
"Powerful...Her book is a disturbing drill down into how the right to vote is being slowly destroyed with too few of us noticing." - Washington Post
"Anderson's description of the perpetual war that blacks and now Latinos have fought to get and keep the right to vote is impeccably researched, deftly written and, sadly, prescient...One Person, No Votes punches above its weight, like a lecture from a professor with superb command of language." - Minneapolis Star Tribune
This information about One Person, No Vote was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of White Rage, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bourgeois Radicals, and Eyes off the Prize. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow for Constitutional Studies. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
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